How the Polling Let Us Down

It’s 48 hours later and a kind of acceptance sets in, guided by the familiar rituals of a peaceful transfer of power. A defeated candidate graciously concedes. And an outgoing president invites us to keep an open mind.

We’re starting to move beyond the shock of Donald J. Trump’s victory to the fact of it. In the latest episode of The Run-Up, we make sense of this new reality by exploring why the polling let us down so spectacularly — and what final tally of voting on Tuesday tells us about who, exactly, elected Mr. Trump. For that, we talk to Nate Cohn of The Upshot, who has guided us through the data in this campaign since the podcast started.

I ask Mr. Cohn when the moment was, on Tuesday night, when he realized that all the polls had led us astray. Early returns from Florida gave a clue, he said, but the real turning point was when we saw what was happening in the Midwest.

“The attenuation of Clinton’s strength in the upper Midwest was so dramatic and evident immediately, because those rural counties come in first in many instances, and they complete first, which for our model is the most important thing,” he says. “When a county is 10 percent in, you can’t put too much stock in what it says at that point. But a rural county can complete fast, and you don’t need many of them to figure out what’s going on.”

We talk about signs of a decline in black turnout this election compared with 2012. “I suppose that it’s possible, when all the votes are in and counted and we get the data back that we need to make this assessment, that we could conclude that Clinton could have narrowly won — barely, and I really mean barely, like, recounts — Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania if black turnout had been at 2012 levels,” Mr. Cohn says. But over all, “it’s not evident to me that the Democrats should blame their loss on that decline in black turnout.”

So what did President Obama have beside a surging black and Hispanic vote that Mrs. Clinton did not?

“Donald Trump won a large number, a very large number, of white, working-class voters who supported the president twice,” Mr. Cohn reminds us. “I think that’s something that a lot of people, particularly if you’re an ideologically committed person who has strong, consistent views on the issues, you can’t fathom that. But if you think about it from the perspective of lower-information voters who are in the white working class, that they actually had very similar messages, Obama and Trump.”

And we discuss what a Trump White House will mean for those Americans who feel overlooked, misunderstood or maligned by President-elect Trump. I spoke with Maureen Dowd, a New York Times columnist and the author of a new book, “The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics,” and Nikole Hannah-Jones, a writer for The Times Magazine who recently examined Mr. Trump’s message to black Americans.

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